*The amount stolen was the equivalent of almost one billion dollars today.
*Father of the future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt.
*"Hard money" advocates favored a conservative monetary policy. They wanted to limit the supply of paper currency in order to control inflation, a gold standard, and the repayment of war debts in silver or gold as opposed to "greenbacks" issued by the government. Debtors, both public and private, by contrast, preferred to pay back their obligations in paper currency.
*Blacks in Congress included Congressmen Benjamin Turner of Alabama, Robert Smalls and Robert Elliot of South Carolina, and Senator Blanche Bruce of Mississippi.
*See the Walking Tour in the appendix.
CHAPTER 23
A Final Devil's Bargain:
The End of Reconstruction
ith Grant's reelection in 1872, one Republican newspaper declared it was "scarcely possible to doubt that this will be the death of the Democratic party."1Manton Marble read the future differently—and more accurately. As he explained in the World on November 15, the election was instead the death knell of the radical Republican movement. In order to oppose Grant's political organization, which had excluded them, Charles Sumner and other aging founders of the Republican party had supported Greeley's anti-Reconstruction candidacy, confirming that radicalism as a set of principles had disintegrated. With the retirement of these erstwhile giants, Marble declared, regular Republicans would have to draw candidates from the mediocre Stalwarts who now ran the party machinery.2
Pushing the northern Democracy's deceptive "New Departure" strategy—of accepting the Reconstruction amendments but opposing their enforcement by insisting on home rule in the South—Marble declared that the "Negro question" was resolved at last, and the two major parties should go head-to-head on economic policy. In a bid to absorb the Liberal Republican movement, Marble called on Democrats to embrace a free-trade philosophy, as expounded by the leading liberal reformers. Marble declared that the immediate task was to "reunite all who held Democratic doctrines before the Republican party was formed, and to reinforce them by the numerous recent converts to the same order of economic and political ideas."3
Marble's wish would be fulfilled in the course of the next few years: While Schurz went back to the regular Republican party, many important Liberal Republicans, including Trumbull, Julian, and Adams, allied themselves with the Democrats. William Lloyd Garrison's warning in 1872—that the Democrats were using the Liberal Republican party as a stalking horse to retake the White House—continued to be valid; the Democrats were borrowing the prestige of the Liberals to burnish a new, more respectable image.4
The Democrats were also helped along in their struggle for survival and resurgence by the Panic of 1873 and the ensuing Great Depression, which reached its nadir five years later but lasted, with ups and downs, for about a quarter of a century.* The feverish expansion of the railroads and the overextension of credit that fueled the booming economy in the decade after the Civil War created a bubble that was bound to burst.5
Like the fifty years before the Civil War, the Reconstruction era was one of bewildering national growth and change. Within a mere eight years after the war, the industrial output of the United States had grown by 75 percent, while the North and West had absorbed three million new immigrants. Outside of farming, the railroads employed more workers than any other sector of the economy. The railroads in turn spawned new industries and technologies, including the use of coal instead of wood to produce steam, the refrigerated railroad car, and, as a result, meat processing and packing. Coal and pig iron production grew by more than 100 percent, and the Bessemer process for making steel became more widespread in the decade after the war. Between 1866 and 1873, the railroads added thirty-five thousand miles of new track, matching the entire amount laid down in the previous thirty-five years. In 1869, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, largely by Irish and Chinese laborers, thrilled the nation and the world.6
This westward growth had its darker side. Grant's campaign call for "Peace" did not include the Plains Indians, who clashed with federal troops and were driven from their ancestral homelands. Railroads and large farms destroyed the buffalo herds which the Native Americans depended on for survival, and their territory shrank to the reservations allotted by the federal government. The Indians were rarely replaced by settlers working small family plots, as envisioned by free-labor ideology: Slavery in the South had been destroyed, but in the West indentured Chinese and Mexican workers labored on immense commercial farms served by the new railroads. And while the railroads reduced freight costs and turned the country into a single sprawling marketplace, the exuberant capital investment on Wall Street, across the North, and in the West largely bypassed the former Confederacy, stifling its postwar recovery and progress—economic, political, and social.7
Moreover, the fast pace of railroad expansion, made possible by government land grants and loans, led to poor-quality tracks, corruption, and precarious financing schemes.8 After failing to sell a multimillion-dollar bond issue for the Northern Pacific Railroad in September 1873, Jay Cooke and Company of Philadelphia, one of the country's major banks, collapsed, triggering the Panic, which shut down the supply of credit throughout the financial system, ruined businesses, and created massive unemployment.9
In the depths of the depression, most of the country's railroads stopped laying track and went bankrupt, which hurt iron producers and other related industries, destroying companies by the thousands. Whereas the American economy before the Civil War had been in transition from preindustrial manufacturing to mechanized production, by 1873, that transformation was all but complete, and the United States was rapidly eclipsing England as the world's largest manufacturer; the depression, which also afflicted western Europe, marked the "first great crisis of industrial capitalism."10
Democrats benefited in various ways from the crisis. Because of anxiety about militant labor protests and violent strikes sparked by wage cuts and unemployment, "the labor question" would soon overshadow "the Negro question" as northerners' chief concern. Northern apathy about the plight of blacks would help pave the way for "home rule" in the South and the demise of Reconstruction.11
Moreover, with northerners struggling to make ends meet, Democrats succeeded in blaming the depression on the party in power, the Republicans. In the wake of the Credit Mobilier scandal—involving the cozy, profitable relationship between directors of the Union Pacific Railroad and certain members of Congress—economic distress enabled the Democrats to call for reform and to sharpen their attacks on bloated and corrupt government, both in Washington and under the carpetbaggers in the South.* After a trail of scandals in the Grant administration, northerners began to listen more closely to Democrats' often exaggerated charges of corruption in the carpetbagger governments.12
• • •
Louisiana's Reconstruction government was an egregious example of that corruption, and even Republicans in Washington admitted it: The carpetbag governor, William Kellogg, was a scoundrel, and his administration would fall unless backed by federal force. Disputed gubernatorial and legislative election results in Louisiana in 1872 had led to the formation of two competing state governments. A federal district court ruled in favor of the Republicans, but instead of backing down, the Democrats organized armed bands, called the White League, that controlled the rural areas covering most of the state.13
Attacking white and black Republicans, the white guerrilla government encountered little effective resistance from the police, the state's mostly black militia, or federal troops stationed primarily in New Orleans. At Colfax, Louisiana, on April 13, 1873, the White League massacred the militia, killing some seventy black men, many of whom had already surrendered. More than one hundred of the White Leaguers were arrested and indicted by federal authorities. The following year, in the run-up to the fall elections, six Republican officials were murdered near Shreveport, and a massive riot broke out in New Orlea
ns two weeks later, leaving thirty dead and one hundred wounded. The police and militia had failed to subdue the White League, and Grant sent more troops to the state.14
Federal troops restored relative calm to Louisiana during the 1874 midterm elections, but they had scant effect in rural areas, where blacks were generally coerced to vote the Democratic ticket. When Republican election officials invalidated the returns from several parishes, the status of five Democratic candidates was thrown into doubt. After the elections, Democrats attempted forcibly to seat the five legislators, and Governor Kellogg called in federal troops, who removed them from the statehouse.15
This display of military force against civil authority shocked the nation, and many Republicans joined the Democratic outcry. Such a dangerous precedent threatened the very foundations of free government, warned Carl Schurz. "If this can be done in Louisiana," he asked, "how long will it be before it can be done in Massachusetts and Ohio? . . . How long before a soldier may stalk into the national House of Representatives, and, pointing to the Speaker's mace, say, 'Take away that bauble!' "16
In Boston, a cockpit of the American Revolution, outraged residents held a public meeting at Faneuil Hall, where they denounced General Philip Sheridan, whose forces had entered the state capitol in New Orleans, while likening the White League and its struggle for freedom to that of the founding fathers. When the renowned abolitionist Wendell Phillips rose to declare the necessity of protecting freedmen in the South, he was heckled by the gathering and drowned out. The New York Times observed that Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison were all but "extinct from American politics," especially in their "ideas in regard to the South."17
In New York, Cincinnati, and other cities, sympathetic Republican leaders addressed rallies organized by Democrats, whose newspapers called for Grant's impeachment and new legal restrictions on presidential use of the military. "Tyranny!" howled Manton Marble's World. "A Sovereign State Murdered." The removal of the Democratic legislators, declared the New Orleans Daily Picayune, proved that Kellogg's carpetbagger government, "brought forth by bayonets" and "nursed by bayonets," could not function without them.18
However, Sheridan called the White Leaguers "banditti" and urged that they be prosecuted in military courts. A majority of radical Republicans, and even some moderates, agreed. One radical Republican paper declared, "Better military rule for forty years than the South be given over to lawlessness and blood for a day."19
This was, in essence, the same advice the Union League gave Lincoln regarding New York after the draft riots. Tragically, the situation in the South echoed Lincoln's very real dilemma over launching an investigation and imposing martial law eleven years earlier. Ultimately, Americans in both the North and South were more upset by the spectacle of federal troops intervening to eject Democratic legislators from a statehouse than they were by the Klan violence that put them in office.20
Undoubtedly, the inherent constraints of republican government—the principle of civil over military rule, and its political impact on northern public opinion—shaped Lincoln's decision not to impose martial law in New York City. Union League men viewed the token prosecution of the draft rioters as a shameful miscarriage of justice, but Lincoln believed a military crackdown on the Democratic machine in New York would have backfired and undermined federal authority while sparking further violence.21
Judging from the results in the South eleven years later, Lincoln may well have been right. The best solution, as the governors of Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee had demonstrated, was for state authorities to clamp down on local political violence without federal help. However, these governors remained the exceptions. Where such vigorous state action was not forthcoming, the best practical solution was a truce by which local Democrats were allowed to keep whatever political offices and power they had attained but were put on notice that the president would not tolerate outbreaks of violence, and federal troops would be used to enforce his will.22
This was Lincoln's approach in 1863 when he refrained from declaring martial law in New York City but sent ten thousand troops to enforce the resumption of the draft. Grant walked a similar fine line in his cautious prosecution of the Klan. He sought to disrupt Klan activity without creating grounds for political grievances against the federal government as an occupying power.
The problem in Louisiana was that the military had gotten out ahead of Grant and crossed that fine line: Colonel Phillippe de Trobriand had responded to Governor Kellogg's request, with Sheridan's subsequent approval, but as Grant later told Congress, he was not notified of the action until it was over. Struggling to contain the political fallout, Grant disavowed but halfheartedly defended the military intervention. By removing Democrats from office, rather than confining itself to quelling violence, the military had entered politics and undermined vital northern support for Reconstruction, even as it tried to uphold it.23
To restore order in Louisiana, Grant, like Lincoln in New York, opted for compromise. He accepted a deal, worked out by a congressional committee, giving Democrats in Louisiana the contested seats and with them control of the legislature's lower house; in exchange, they allowed the carpetbag governor to finish the last two years of his term in peace.24
Violence was rampant in other states across the South during the 1874 midterm elections, helping to break down the local Republican organizations and deliver Democratic victories. In Arkansas, South Carolina, and Florida, Republicans began splitting into contending groups, giving the Democrats an advantage. At the beginning of 1873, Republicans had firmly controlled only four southern states—Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina— while keeping a tenuous grip on several others. By the end of 1874, Arkansas, Alabama, and Texas had been added to the list of state governments being run entirely by Democrats.25
The Democrats' electoral gains in 1874 were not confined to the southern states, and they took control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1856. The depression fueled the Democratic resurgence, but Republicans also suspected that their support for carpetbagger governments was a liability. With the presidential election of 1876 approaching, northern Republicans were ready to cut loose from their sinking southern party members and to end Reconstruction.26
That southern Republicans were on their own became abundantly clear when Democratic "rifle clubs" in Mississippi systematically started riots at Republican gatherings across the state. In a single incident at Vicksburg in December 1874, thirty-five blacks were killed. The attacks continued, and nine months later Ohio Republicans, after taking the pulse of their constituents during the fall elections, persuaded the Grant administration not to send federal troops to Mississippi despite an appeal from the carpetbag governor, a decorated Union veteran and distinguished public servant.27
Thus Reconstruction, which seemed to have gotten a solid endorsement with Grant's victory some two years earlier, remained under vigorous attack, while support for it in the North proved shallow and soon evaporated.28Federal arrests and prosecutions of Klansmen had declined in 1873, and by 1874 northerners were more concerned with leaving the war in the past than with the protection of blacks' civil rights. The South was no longer the enemy, and the "military necessity" that motivated the Emancipation Proclamation was gone, along with the veneer of idealism possessed by all but the most radical of Republicans.29
In the South, Klan violence resumed as federal arrests declined. The survival of the Democratic party meant that Marble's and Wood's version of settling the "Negro question" would soon prevail over Garnet's definition of racial equality. The lynch-mob aspect of the draft riots—the outcry against the Emancipation Proclamation and black equality at the dawn of the Reconstruction era in 1863—would continue to shape its course until the end.30
In New York, the 1874 elections solidified Manton Marble's allegiance to Samuel Tilden, the "Sage of Gramercy Park," also hailed since Tweed's demise as "the Hercules who slew the Tammany Flydra." Tilden was pitted by the Democrats ag
ainst the incumbent, John Dix, in the governor's race. Dix was assailed as a creature of Grantism, since he was president of the Union Pacific Railroad during the Credit Mobilier scandal. Marble's World decried the monopolistic power of the railroads for crushing competition and free trade. Grant himself was accused of sustaining Reconstruction policies that were "crimes against the social order and human honesty." As for the president's handling of the depression, the World declared, "Every vote for Dix is a vote for Grant and Hard Times."31
Tilden won the governorship by a large margin, and Marble more than ever became the spokesman of the rising Democratic tide. He spelled out the Democrats' party line—hard money, free trade, and home rule—and their ambition to win control of the Senate and retake the White House. In Tilden, the crusading new governor of the wealthiest and most populous state, the party at last had a viable presidential candidate, just in time for the nation's centennial election in 1876.32
At the same time, the World's circulation and advertising revenue, on the decline for several years, began to plummet. While 1868 had been Marble's most profitable year, he had bucked the party line on various occasions since then and alienated Democratic readers. His opposition to the Seymour-Blair ticket in 1868 had angered the Albany Regency and its constituents, much as criticism of Tweed and his new charter upset Tammany loyalists in 1870. Marble's failure to rally behind Greeley in 1872 also counted against him with party leaders intent on beating Grant. Starting in 1873, the depression accelerated the World's failure, and by September 1875 it was losing money so quickly that Marble had to put it up for sale. The sale was "a very serious sacrifice of my own personal interests and ambitions," he said.33
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